But there was one shining factor on our side: Admiral Tom Phillips and his battle fleet. I would think of those ships steaming north through the rain showers, their grey sides glistening and their huge battle ensigns flying at their mastheads, and feel a throb of pure joy. For hundreds of years, I’d tell myself, the Royal Navy had been victorious, and it was unthinkable that rusty little Japanese ships manned by little Japanese sailors in crumpled uniforms could prevail against them.
Denis was home early with news that he had a couple of days off while Penghulu had new fire-fighting equipment fitted, so we decided to make the next day a Make and Mend day. Make and Mend is a naval tradition – a day dedicated to doing things for oneself. Completing the little chores that have been stacking up for ages. Enjoying little treats one has deprived oneself of in the line of duty. In a word, taking time out to focus on one’s own needs and interests. On a Make and Mend day one is not allowed to feel selfish: being selfish is what it’s all about.
So in the morning we indulged ourselves in a long, rambling ride without thought of time or duties. We went as far as Changi Prison and tied our horses up on the padang while we poked around the native shops, then enjoyed a hard gallop back along the beach. After breakfast Denis marked out where the air-raid shelter was to be, and we took the children out in the canoes, splashing each other with our paddles and then trying to tip each other’s craft over in the warm, shallow water. We called in on the Deans for a picnic lunch by their tennis court (it was too hot to play), and then we all drove down to the Swimming Club for a swim and drinks in the cool shade of the upstairs terrace.
I recall that I had just divided a plate of hot chips into four portions for the four children and was telling them not to pinch from each other when Margaret laid her hand on my arm. There was a radio on somewhere and everybody around us was listening.
The words of the news bulletin sent a chill through me but at first made no sense whatever. Something about Singapore hospitals being asked to make preparations to receive hundreds of expected casualties. But then the import of the bulletin became clear and I felt physically sick.
The Prince of Wales and the Repulse had both been sunk, and Admiral Sir Tom Phillips’ fleet was no more.
Chapter Twenty-Three
There is a concept known to naval strategists as ‘the Fleet in Being’. The Fleet in Being protects a sea-girt country from invasion even if it never fires a shot in anger, because no invader could risk putting troops to sea while there is a chance they might be intercepted by warships. It is a concept that has served England well since the Spanish Armada, which is why even aggressive admirals like Jellico refused battle unless certain of success. When Jellico was criticised for refusing to chance his arm against the German Fleet at Jutland, it was said in his defence that he was ‘the only man in England who could have lost the war in an afternoon’.
Well, Tom Phillips had chanced his arm off the north coast of Malaya, and in losing his fleet he had lost the war in an afternoon. Without a Fleet in Being to deter the Japanese, Singapore was a sitting duck. Not many of us may have thought of it in terms of the principles of naval strategy, but the facts of the situation were as plain as a pikestaff.
I remember that we all carried on that evening as normally as we could. We took the children for a night swim in the paddling pool, and then chatted inconsequentially with a couple of families sitting close to us on the patio. But underneath it all there ran a sharp, bright thread of worry, and it was a blessed relief to get home, put the children to bed, and to be alone.
Denis and I sat side by side on the verandah, talking quietly without even bothering to turn on the lights. It seemed suddenly clear that we were going to lose Whitelawns, and all that went with it. Riding on the beach at dawn. Tennis on the Deans’ lush grass court. Splashing in the warm waters off our beach, the two boys as brown as berries and the sun transforming their blond hair into golden haloes.
We might also lose our lives. The possibility stared us in the face, uncompromising, unarguable. I wasn’t frightened, not at that moment. Probably I was too tired and too shocked to feel anything. We went to bed and made gentle love, the moonlight tracing patterns on our bedroom wall as it filtered through the coconut fronds. It was comforting being together, holding each other tight, being one against the world.
I slept soundly but woke up as the grey light of dawn percolated into the room, making it look dull and cheerless. The pattern of coconut fronds had gone and I felt suddenly lonely, and infinitely sad. To have been so happy, and then to have everything snatched away. I found myself blaming poor Admiral Phillips, who had gone down with his ship. It seemed to me inconceivable that he could lose those two great capital ships so easily. Weren’t they supposed to be the most powerful naval units in the world? Weren’t they supposed to guarantee Singapore against invasion? They had been swept into oblivion, as a truculent child might sweep prize chess pieces from the board.
We heard what had happened only after the war. Tom Phillips had taken his battle group north, looking for trouble, anxious to nip the Japanese invasion of northern Malaya in the bud. He had been warned early on that there was no air cover available, and been ordered back to Singapore. But Phillips always asked himself what Nelson would have done in any situation, and when he looked out of his bridge windows at the heavy cloud and drifting rain he turned a Nelsonian blind eye on the recall signal. When he heard a report that the Japanese were about to land at Kuantan he decided to attack under cover of the weather and shell the invasion fleet out of existence. With his huge guns he could do it from twenty miles away, firing with impunity out of the misty rain with his guns under radar control. The sleek grey fleet worked up to attack speed, their Union Jacks flying, water creaming from their bows, their guns at maximum elevation. The Japanese battleship Kongo glimpsed them through the murk – a vision straight from hell – and made a bolt for it. They got within hours of Kuantan and it looked, for one wild moment, as if the gamble would pay off. But then the sky suddenly cleared and they were left exposed. Within an hour they were under air attack, and within another hour it was all over. They say the Prince of Wales made a sound like a giant in mortal agony as its huge bulk slid under the South China Sea.
Admiral Tom Phillips had dared mightily – and lost. If the cloud cover had persisted another hour on that fateful afternoon, perhaps the whole story of the Malayan campaign might have been different. But all I knew was that Tom Phillips had let us down, and that I hated him for his cocky grin and his careless courage. He should have run away, kept his fleet in being, let us keep our hopes alive. I remember sitting up in bed in that grey dawn, staring out at the empty sea, remembering the ships I’d seen passing in their glory. The four destroyers Electra, Vampire, Tenedos and Express survived the encounter, and brought the survivors back to Singapore.
Ironically, it rained most of that day – heavy tropical rain that lashed the garden, sluiced off the roof in torrents, and flooded the air-raid shelter Chu Lun was digging on the edge of the croquet lawn. We spent most of the day indoors playing with the children and listening to the radio. Radio Malaya was full of stories of the sinkings, some sad and sensible, some quite silly. The most fatuous was an interview with a self-appointed ‘strategic analyst’ who said that the destruction of the capital ships was ‘a blessing in disguise’. ‘It has given the Japanese a quite false impression that we are weak,’ he said, with a chuckle intended to convey how preposterous such a concept was. ‘And just between you and me, we’ve now got the survivors of the sinkings – two thousand tough, well-trained British sailors – available for the defence of Singapore.’ He seemed to be suggesting that the disaster had been a rather clever ploy by Admiral Phillips to trick the Japs and to release his ships’ crews to fight on land. Denis was so disgusted he turned the set off with a snarl. ‘It’s blind oafs like that who will lose this war for us,’ he said bitterly.
We went for a walk in the rain, the boys dancing along beside us holding up
brightly coloured little Chinese waxed-paper umbrellas, Denis and I enjoying the water on our faces and in our hair. We walked hard along the grey, wet beach, exorcising the pain we felt with exercise. By the time we came to Mata Ikan we felt better, and turned into the little kampong whistling one of our favourite songs in tune. Ahmet Pelowan, the village headman, ran out from his house to meet us. ‘Tuan, Mem,’ he called. ‘Please come into the shelter of my house and drink some tea with me.’
We sat on Ahmet’s verandah, the rain drumming on the atap roof, and sipped hot black tea from little copper cups. Behind us in the dark, spicesmelling interior of the house, I could hear Tony and Bobby beginning to make shy conversation with the penghulu’s children. They could speak Malay almost as easily as they could speak English. It was sad that European children in the Far East lost their bilingual ability as soon as they went to school.
‘It is a bad thing, the bombing,’ Ahmet said sadly. ‘Many people were killed, many people have lost their homes. What is the Government going to do about it, Tuan?’
Denis pursed his lips. ‘Ahmet, it would be easy for me to say that we will soon defeat the Japanese,’ he said. ‘But I do not think that will happen. I think there will be a lot more bombing, and a lot of fighting, before peace comes back to Malaya.’
‘Is there any chance that the Japanese will win this war, Tuan?’ Ahmet asked. ‘I need to know because if they do my people will have to live with them. The British have somewhere else to go, but not my people. This is where they will live their lives, where their children will live their lives. If the government is going to be a Japanese government, it would not be wise for my people to work too closely with the British at this time.’ Ahmet was a wise, thoughtful man, and I admired him for being so frank.
‘If all of us took that position, the Japanese will surely be the new masters of Malaya,’ Denis said, almost sharply. ‘And I can tell you, Ahmet, that they will not be good or caring masters. We British may have made some mistakes in ruling Malaya, but the evil the Japanese would do in this land would not be by mistake, it would be their deliberate policy. Look what they are doing already in the countries they have captured. They are killing the local people in hundreds of thousands and taking the riches of their lands without even the pretence of paying for them.’
Ahmet shook his head gravely. ‘I dread the thought of the Japanese coming as much as you do, Tuan. And I will myself do anything in my power to fight them. But I also have to think ahead. If the Japanese do win, and a Japanese soldier comes to Mata Ikun to find out who helped the British, I want to be able to tell him that nobody did. I want my people to be able to live without fear of being dragged away and shot as collaborators.’
Denis didn’t answer for a while, and then he reached across and patted the man on his shoulder. ‘You must do your duty as penghulu as you think best, Ahmet,’ he said. ‘As I must do mine. Let us hope we can remain friends.’
The rain eased off and we set off down the muddy street, watched by people from the shelter of their houses. Already there was a perceptible change in the atmosphere: an air of cautious restraint. The invincibility of the tuans had been broken, and the villagers were hedging their bets. But the little children were the same, following us for a while, exchanging smiling comments with the boys. We passed an open store, and the Chinese proprietor ran out and gave the boys a paper kite each. The sun broke through for a moment, so that the soft rain looked like falling silver confetti. A monkey’s wedding.
We walked home through back roads lined with lallang and occasional clumps of sugar cane, a tired Bobby on Denis’s shoulders, Tony holding my hand, his kite clutched proudly. ‘It’s a dragon kite,’ he told me seriously. ‘It’s the sort the local boys fight with. You rub sharp stuff on the string and then you can use it to cut other kites’ strings. I’m going to learn how to fight with it.’
Just then we heard the air-raid sirens starting up in Changi, and almost immediately planes flashed close overhead. Heavy, twin-engine planes with huge red Rising Suns on their wings and fuselage. They were no more than a thousand feet above us and as I looked up I saw bombs tumbling from the belly of one of them.
‘Into the sugarcane!’ Denis snapped, and we were running pell-mell into the green, sweet-smelling thicket, Tony still clutching his kite, Bobby gurgling with delight at the excitement, riding Denis’s shoulders like a jockey on a horse.
‘I saw bombs falling,’ I gasped.
‘Miles away,’ Denis said. ‘They’re bombing the East Coast Road. We are in no danger here unless some confounded fighter comes nosing around. That’s why we’ve got to keep out of sight.’
We lay pressed to the earth, staring up into a sky suddenly treacherously clear and blue. And then the earth beneath me fluttered, a feeling that came before the dull ‘whump’ of the bombs exploding. The bombs were not falling miles away, I knew that. They might have been intended for the East Coast Road but they were way off beam. I tried to work out where they were falling. The sound seemed to be coming from the direction of Whitelawns and I felt a sudden, sharp pain in my chest. What if they were bombing the house?
Or the Deans’ house? I had a sudden vision of Margaret and the boys quite alone with bombs falling all around then. Then breathed easier, remembering that she had taken the boys to visit friends in Woodlands Road, miles the other side of Singapore.
‘I want to see the planes!’ Bobby had unaccountably broken loose and was making a toddling but determined run for the road. Just as he reached it another stick of bombs began to detonate, sounding even closer. I screamed, scrambling after him on knees turned to jelly, but Denis was there first, sweeping him up into the air. ‘Planes are bad planes,’ he said, giving him a hug and hurrying back into the sugarcane. ‘We must hide. We mustn’t let the planes see us.’
Above the deep rumble of the bombs, there was a sudden, sharper sound – Bang! Bang! Bang! Looking up through the waving cane I saw puffs of brown smoke appearing in the sky – ack-ack fire from the military camp at Changi. The puffs were nowhere near any aeroplanes but it was good to see us fighting back.
The raid moved on to Singapore. Again I heard the almost continuous rumble of heavy bombing. It was a sound I was to hear often in the months ahead, and still hear occasionally in my dreams. It is a terrible sound because it seems so innocent, reminding me of the lazy afternoons when I used to hear a storm rumbling out in the Singapore Straits and I’d rush around the house with Amah closing all the shutters.
It was after six o’clock when the all-clear sounded and the sun was setting, turning the sea once more to burnished copper. Denis and I gripped hands as we approached the house, but as we topped the gentle rise we saw at once that Whitelawns, and the Deans’ house beyond, were quite untouched. In fact, Whitelawns was a picture of tranquillity with two Tamil gardeners scything the lawn and Amah and one of her daughters visible through the dining room window laying the dinner things.
There was a message from the Naval Base: HMMS Penghulu was sailing at midnight and Denis was required to report to the ship immediately. We just looked at each other. I knew he wanted to stay, talk to me about the raid, make sure we were all right. He knew I hated the thought of him going, and that I was dreading the pain I’d feel every minute he was away. But we both knew there was nothing either of us could do about it. Except to smile into each other’s eyes in total understanding.
The Penghulu was at sea for two days on that occasion, and I actually saw her chugging past Whitelawns on the second day, her White Ensign looking brave but slightly out of place above the jumble of sweeping gear and tangled lines on the deck. I waved furiously from the beach, and I think I saw someone waving in return but then she disappeared around the point, leaving just the empty sea marked with her wake. I remember thinking what a strange, local war it was when a wife could wave to her husband when he was on patrol.
Denis came home tired and frustrated, and immediately stripped off for a swim even though the sun had already gone dow
n. ‘It’s so pointless!’ he called from the water. ‘We’re just churning around Singapore Island like a headless chicken. Nobody seems to have the foggiest idea what to do with us. George thinks we should just push off up north and see what’s happening. At least that way we’d feel useful.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I called back. Truthfully, of course, I was offering up a small prayer that whoever was holding Penghulu back from ‘pushing off up north’ would stick to his decision. Tom Phillips had pushed off up north and he was dead.
Denis came splashing out of the water and I chucked him his towel. ‘Spoken to Molly or Tanya today?’ he asked casually.
I hadn’t, and asked why he had asked. ‘There was a raid on Penang today,’ he said quietly. ‘A bad show. There was no warning and no ack-ack. Quite a lot of casualties.
It was on the news after dinner. Thousands had been killed, the Japanese planes coming in waves and bombing my poor Penang at will. At first the people of George Town had actually come out onto the streets to see what was happening, lured to their deaths by ignorance and the display above them. There had been frightful casualties, and all the hospitals were full to overflowing.
I rang Tanya and breathed a huge sigh of relief when she answered on the first ring. ‘Are you both all right?’ I asked.
‘Oh, the bombing was nowhere near us,’ Tanya said, almost impatiently. ‘It was down in the city. Eugene is home. His temperature rose to one hundred and five, but then it broke and now he’s a lot better. But the doctors won’t let him join his stay-behind party in Kuala Kangsar. You know Ivan got him into the Army? Eugene is furious. If he doesn’t join his group soon he’ll miss out when they go into the jungle. The party is on first readiness because the Japs are already halfway across the Peninsula.’
In the Mouth of the Tiger Page 47